manuscript-tools

A QA toolkit for German Markdown manuscripts. Validates style, sanitizes encoding, converts quotation marks, and measures readability.

Deutsche Version | Wiki

Installation

pip install manuscript-tools

Or as project dependency:

poetry add manuscript-tools

Commands

Quick start

# Full QA pipeline
ms-validate manuscript/

# Style check only (core rules)
ms-check manuscript/

# Style check with prose analysis (filler words, passive voice, sentence length)
ms-check manuscript/ --strict

# Readability report
ms-metrics manuscript/

# Fix quotation marks (dry-run)
ms-quotes manuscript/ --dry-run

# Fix broken bold/italic formatting (dry-run)
ms-format manuscript/ --dry-run

# Rewrite -- and spaced hyphens to en-dashes (German typography, dry-run)
ms-dashes manuscript/ --to en --dry-run

# Rewrite ASCII umlauts like "fuer" and "Uebung" (dry-run)
ms-umlauts manuscript/ --dry-run

File selection

Not limited to Markdown. Directories are scanned with the glob **/*.md by default; a single file passed as argument is processed as-is, regardless of extension:

# Single file: no glob filter applied
ms-check brief.txt

# Directory with other extensions: override the glob
ms-sanitize docs/ --include '**/*.txt'
ms-check kapitel/ --include '**/*.tex' --exclude '**/build/**'

Files must be UTF-8 text (txt, tex, rst, html, ...) — binary formats like docx or pdf are not supported. The broken-formatting rule checks Markdown **/* markers; for non-Markdown files it is harmless, or disable it via disable = ["broken-formatting"] in the configuration.

Example

A manuscript with typical artifacts from AI tools, copy-paste, or code formatters — line 1 contains an invisible zero-width space (U+200B) after "Test":

Das ist ein Test mit unsichtbarem Zeichen.

Er sagte: "Hallo Welt" und ging.

Dies ist ein **
wichtiger Satz** im Text.

ms-check reports every problem with file, line, and rule — invisible characters are named by codepoint:

$ ms-check kapitel-01.md
FAIL: kapitel-01.md:1 [no-invisible-chars] Unsichtbare Unicode-Zeichen gefunden: U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE
FAIL: kapitel-01.md:3 [non-german-quotes] Nicht-deutsche Anführungszeichen gefunden
FAIL: kapitel-01.md:5 [broken-formatting] Oeffnendes ** am Zeilenende (Formatierung gebrochen)
------------------------------------------------------------
Dateien: 1, Woerter: 21
Status: FEHLER (1 Dateien, 3 Verstoss(e))

Fix step by step — every fixer supports --dry-run (preview) and writes .bak backups:

$ ms-sanitize kapitel-01.md
CLEANED: kapitel-01.md
$ ms-quotes kapitel-01.md
FIXED: kapitel-01.md (1 Ersetzung(en))
$ ms-format kapitel-01.md
FIXED: kapitel-01.md (1 bold, 0 italic)
$ ms-check kapitel-01.md
OK: kapitel-01.md (20 Woerter)
Status: OK

Result:

Das ist ein Test mit unsichtbarem Zeichen.

Er sagte: „Hallo Welt“ und ging.

Dies ist ein **wichtiger Satz** im Text.

Or run the whole pipeline in one go: ms-validate kapitel-01.md --fix.

Rules

Core (always active):

no-dashes, no-invisible-chars, no-repeated-words, no-double-spaces, non-german-quotes, broken-formatting

Prose (with --strict or ms-validate):

max-sentence-length, filler-words-de, passive-voice-de

Opt-in (via rules = [...] in the configuration):

faked-dashes — flags -- and spaced hyphens standing in for a real dash. By design it contradicts no-dashes (one forbids dashes, the other demands correctly typed ones), so enable one and disable the other. ms-dashes --to em|en rewrites the findings:

Er kam -- wie immer -- viel zu spaet.      # before
Er kam – wie immer – viel zu spaet.        # after ms-dashes --to en
Seiten 12 - 15 behandeln das Thema.        # numeric ranges stay untouched
[x](https://img.shields.io/badge/a--b)     # URLs and badge slugs stay untouched

ascii-umlauts — flags ASCII umlaut spellings (fuer, Uebung) from a curated word list; ms-umlauts rewrites them. Deliberately not a pattern: German is full of legitimate ae/oe/ue sequences ("Frauen", "Goethe", "Aerobic"), so only vetted whole words are touched — zero false positives by construction. Extend the list per project via umlaut-words-extra = ["oekologie"]. ss to ß is out of scope (context-dependent, Swiss orthography conflict).

Das waere natuerlich schoen fuer alle.     # before
Das wäre natürlich schön für alle.         # after ms-umlauts
Goethe traf die Frauen beim Feuer.         # names and diphthongs stay untouched

Custom rules are simple callables with the signature (text: str, path: Path) -> list[StyleViolation]. See the Wiki for a step-by-step tutorial.

Configuration

Configure via [tool.manuscript-tools] in your pyproject.toml:

[tool.manuscript-tools]
rules = ["max-sentence-length"]          # merge with defaults
disable = ["passive-voice-de"]           # remove from active set
max-sentence-words = 30                  # default: 40
flesch-target = [65, 80]                 # warn if outside range
filler-words-extra = ["definitiv", "absolut"]  # extend filler list
umlaut-words-extra = ["oekologie"]       # extend the ascii-umlauts word list

No config = all defaults. rules merges with defaults (union). disable removes from the active set and takes precedence over rules. See the Wiki for details.

Readability

ms-metrics computes the Flesch-DE reading ease score (Amstad, 1978) with German-optimized syllable counting. Score interpretation:

Development

git clone https://github.com/astrapi69/manuscript-tools.git
cd manuscript-tools
make install-dev
make ci          # lint + format check + 226 tests

Documentation

Full documentation is available in the Wiki:

• Installation and Setup
• Usage
• Writing Custom Rules
• Integration into Projects
• Publishing to PyPI
• Development and CI
• FAQ
• Quick Start for Book Projects
• Configuration

License

BSD 3-Clause. See LICENSE.